Closing Canada’s tech gender gap, one line of code at a time

When it comes to rankings of livability, transparency and even happiness, Canada is used to being on the top of the global heap. Gender equality, however, is a slightly different story.

Earlier this fall, the seventh annual Global Gender Gap Report — an index of states that have best addressed gender inequality — ranked Canada 20, behind countries such as South Africa, Nicaragua and Cuba. Wage inequality and political empowerment for women were particular sore points, with Canada ranking 35 and 41, respectively.

To those areas of concern should be added another: entrepreneurship. The “entrepreneurship gap” between women and men in Canada is nothing short of “striking,” according to a report from TD Bank showing Canadian women are only about half as likely as men to start their own business. This is despite the fact they make up half of the workforce and more than half of post-secondary students.

For venture-backed tech startups, the disparity is even greater. While it’s difficult to find statistics specifically for Canada, figures from the U.S. hint at the scale of the problem. A mere 1.3% of founders at privately held, venture-backed companies are women, a 2012 Dow Jones study found. At the same time, women-led startups have been shown to achieve up to a 35% higher return on investment, a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek explains.

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So why does this gap persist and why is it so entrenched in tech? You can point to the scarcity of female role models, though thankfully high-profile leaders including Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg are slowly changing that.

Or there’s the “old boys’ club” argument: In the startup world, it’s impossible to connect with the right mentors, advisors and investors without a strong network. If women are unable to tap into that male-dominated ecosystem, then they’re at a marked disadvantage.

But closer to home, I see a slightly different issue in play. I’d like to think HootSuite, for instance, is anything but a stodgy old boys’ club. As a social media company, the heart of our business is building relationships. Our employees are by and large young, progressive and open-minded.

Truly narrowing the gender gap in the startup community comes down in large part to how we teach children

Yet the numbers don’t lie. Out of every 10 people interviewed for a tech position at our office, nine are men. We have approximately 50 engineers and developers on our team, and fewer than 20 are women. (By contrast, the gender breakdown is closer to 50-50 in other departments.)

In tech, it seems, it’s hard to get around a simple reality: Computer science, the backbone of any startup, is still a male-dominated field. Women account for fewer than 20% of students in Canadian computer science and engineering programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, a report based on data from Statistics Canada shows. Coding, in particular — caricatured as marathon, late-night computer programming sessions in movies such as The Social Network — has traditionally been seen as a guys’ thing.

But it doesn’t have to be. Girl Dev is a pilot program started at HootSuite. Once a week for three hours, groups of women interested in improving their computer coding skills meet in the cafeteria after work. The basics of HTML and CSS are taught but so too are more advanced topics including Javascript, PHP and app development in a supportive and non-competitive environment.

HootSuite also hosts monthly meetups of Ladies Learning Code, a Toronto-based initiative that has introduced more than 4,000 women and girls to programming and technical skills since 2011. Approximately one Saturday a month in our office, a dozen mentors and about 40 attendees spend eight hours working together. Importantly, it’s not just code: Mentors introduce themselves, share their personal stories and offer insight on how women can thrive in a male-dominated industry.

Creating supportive environments to learn computer science skills is a start. But truly narrowing the gender gap in the startup community comes down in large part to how we teach children. Providing better computer science education in public schools and encouraging girls to participate, is perhaps the only way to rewrite the stereotypes and break open the old boys’ club.

To that end, Ladies Learning Code recently introduced Girls Learning Code, camps and workshops aimed at 8- to 13- and 13- to 17-year-old girls. With a focus on teamwork, creativity and technology, the program hopes to help girls see tech as a medium for self-expression and a means of changing the world, noted Emma Nemtin, marketing director for tech company Hubba and one of the organization’s mentors, in a recent post for my company’s blog.

“By giving the girls a great learning experience, putting them in a room with dozens of other girls who also think technology is cool, giving them access to mentors and role models, and then showing them examples of what it can mean to work in tech, we’re doing everything we can to ensure these girls grow up knowing that they have a choice.”

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